don't really post on here very much, but i definitely have something to share.
growing up skating in santa cruz county in the mid 90's marc, louie, and jerry were our everything. tilt mode in general meant the world to myself, my friends, and pretty much everyone in the area. one day i was skating a rail in a town called aptos. the rail basically landed into an intersection across the street from a beach side hotel. i had a friend in the street watching for traffic, and one at the bottom of the rail filming. after one of the tries my friend who was watching for traffic yelled to us that he just saw marc johnson. we looked over and saw two people in the distance and i thought eh, yeah maybe and just skating.
when the two people realized that they had been spotted they took off and ran towards the seascape resort. didn't really think much of it. san jose being just over the hill i thought it very well could have been marc, but i went back to skating. after a few more minutes of throwing myself at that rail, a car pulls up right behind me up where i was throwing down and out comes marc johnson and chris avery. they called for my 2 homies to come up from the street and they laced all of us up huge with enjoi stuff. the company had just launched earlier that year so it was unreal to be getting that stuff from them. it was my first time ever meeting a pro in the wild. to this day it's one of my fondest memories of growing up skating.
i actually found a huge bag of stickers are my parents house last christmas and i still had a few stragglers left in there from this day. some OG big panda stickers, other random ones, and one that said "TOURettes syndrome" which i think was the name of one of their early tours from when they had launched.
pretty sure that was 2001, and then fast forward to 2015 or so and i'm skating at biebel's park late one night. it was just me and one homie for 2 hour or so, and then at about midnight marc shows up solo. we figured that was a sign to call it and let the man have the park to himself. my friend knew marc well so he came up to us when he came in. i hadn't seen marc in the flesh since 2001 so i just sort of kept it light and figured i'd keep it moving. he seemed super mellow, didn't make it seem like we needed to leave or let him skate alone or anything but we were ready to go anyway.
right before we left i was like fuck it i'm going to bring up that childhood story. i told him and he was like "dude that was you? i remember that!" he pretty much said that was the only time that he had ever stayed at the seascape resort which is why he remembered. marc mentioned that he was infact with chris avery and that the reason they were there was because they were going to a wedding at the resort that weekend. when i told him that we thought they ran away because they dind't want to be bugged he said that wasn't the case. apparently he told chris something along the lines of "lets go grab everything we have for them" and they took off running in case we were gone by the time they got over to us with the car. they went so out of their way to stoke out a few random little kids. i always think about how they made the choice to do that instead of just be like "oh look, some skaters" and then go about their day.
that night i was so close to not bringing it up to him. meeting him and making small talk for a few minutes was cool enough! honestly didn't expect him to remember the moment at all. it made it all that more special in the end that he did remember. i'm so glad that i told him about it because i would have regrets about not saying anything now. after that i never saw him again. no doubt there are tons of other people who he has touched in a similar way all over the world that will now forever hold onto those moments and memories.
i hope that whatever form of existence, or energy he has now become, that he can feel how much he is loved and will continue to be cherished <3
Topic: R.I.P. Marc Johnson (Read 92629 times)